(1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for retrieving voice files, and more particularly to a retrieval method for directly retrieving the home address of the voice file to speed up the searching process.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
It has been one of the mainstream goals and also one of the must ability for people's career to have a preferable speech ability for electronic dictionaries. Therefore, various electronic dictionaries have been provided to the market to help people achieving the aforesaid goals. In these electronic dictionaries, to have the lexical articulation (voice) is one of the basic elements.
Generally, the electronic dictionary having the lexical articulation function needs to store both the definition of the word and the voice file recording the articulation of the word. When an articulation function of a word has been selected, a search on all the voice files has to be executed so as to retrieve correctly the corresponding voice file for broadcasting.
Traditionally, the amount of the voice files is huge and increasing. Therefore, the storage and search of the voice files in the electronic dictionary has become a severe challenge to this industry.
By taking an electronic Chinese-English bilingual dictionary for example, at least 50,000 voice files are basically needed. Even these voice files are stored by compression coding into respective files of adaptive multi-rate (AMR) format, the storage space would require at least 20,000,000,000,000-bit bytes.
Besides the occupation problem raised by the huge storage space in demand, the speed in retrieving the correct voice file from the mega data bank of the AMR files is usually too slow to be tolerated.
Currently, the function of the simple lexical articulation does merely satisfy the people basic need. The new function in voicing a complete example sentence is become a hot topic to the electronic dictionaries. However, it is much complicated to retrieve the voicing of a complete sentence that is consisted of several words. Generally, plural voice files have to be retrieved so as to compose the articulation of the sentence for voicing a complete sentence. Definitely, the speed in achieving the articulation of a complete sentence is far slower than people expected.
Therefore, how to resolve the storage and retrieval problems in the electronic dictionaries is an important issue that the skilled person in the art is particularly devoted to.